Alan Richman: Is Harlem New York's Next Dining Destination?

Minton's House Band performing on the Minton's stage. Photo: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn/Courtesy of Minton's

It’s hard to have Harlem on your mind when you never know what to think of it. Clearly, it’s a sizeable block of land in northern Manhattan, but not much else is unambiguous. It’s changing again, as it always has, this time becoming much like the rest of Manhattan. New York City’s most idiosyncratic neighborhood — viewed with trepidation by many from the 1950s on — is engaging and accessible these days.

All sorts of interesting folks lived there over the centuries — Dutch, English, Jews, Italians, African-Americans, and Hispanics. Many of them still do. So to announce that it’s multi-cultural is to reiterate what it’s always been. Right now you’ll find more than a whiff of gentrification that, as always, expresses itself in a new generation of restaurants.

Through most of my lifetime Southern soul food was Harlem’s culinary lure. Some of it was pretty good and Charles’ Country Pan Fried Chicken (its most recent name) was wonderful. Now come Minton’s Jazz Club and The Cecil on 118th Street in what’s called Lower Harlem, and Mountain Bird on 145th Street in Upper Harlem.

When I walked down 118th recently, I stumbled upon Lee Lee’s Baked Goods, whose owner has been making the Jewish pastry called rugelach for nearly 50 years. That means he started baking treats for Harlem Jews well after Harlem Jews started leaving. (The timing might have been bad but the rugelach is memorable, if you like yours less sugary and crisper than most.)

I had a dinner at each of the three new spots, and I strolled the streets, too, which was just as fascinating. Harlem changes dramatically just south of 125th Street, which is considered the heart of Harlem in the same way that 42nd Street is often thought of as the heart of New York City. Walk south from 125th toward 118th and you’ll immediately think you’ve entered an extension of the Upper East Side.

The townhouses, some of them brownstones, are so appealing you’ll regret not buying 20 years ago, when they were a bargain. You’ll pass spiffy-sounding establishments such as the Madison Avenue Dental Associates. Harlem has always been renowned for its small churches, and I don’t believe many are lovelier than the New Bethel Way of the Cross Church of Christ on 118th. The area isn’t perfect: There are still too many signs posted on residential buildings warning “no loitering” and “no trespassing.” You won’t see many of those south of 96th.

If you walk along 145th Street from west to east, you’ll pass cross streets you probably never knew existed, such as Bradhurst and Edgecombe Avenues. You’ll stroll by Jackie Robinson Park, probably for the first time. The street has a neighborly feel to it toward the west and a commercial feel to the east, where traffic empties into the 145th Street Bridge. The block before the bridge features an excess of filling stations, making it resemble the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel.

Mountain Bird is located precisely where 145th Street changes, becomes less people-friendly, but only in the conventional sense. You’ll know you’ve inadvertently passed it when you come to the juice bar specializing in sexual enhancement products.

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Mountain Bird looks marvelously out-of-place, as though a tornado snatched it from Montmartre, carried it across the Atlantic, and deposited it gently on 145th Street. It would not have been heavy lifting — the impossibly small bistro seats 19, and the service staff consists of one small Japanese woman so gracious she seems to float through the room. If you’ve looked at photos of the interior, you’ll be reminded of the bed and breakfast room you booked online that appeared spacious but turned out to be too small for both you and your suitcase.

The name, or the initials MB, are everywhere — on the window, the floor, the presentation plates, and the little decorative boxes that give the place a Parisian patisserie look. Even more evocative are the lace curtains and the two antique-looking fringed table lamps with roosters strutting around the base. Those are a reminder of the essence of dining here: You’d better be in the mood for chicken, or a close relative, because Mountain Bird is about piles of poultry. There’s chicken slabs (schnitzel), chicken duos (roasted breast, braised leg), and chicken bits (heart, comb, gizzard, liver.) Add turkey sausage, turkey burgers, and turkey drumsticks. More? There’s duck, both breast and leg. Plus occasional specials, many of them featuring feathered fare. It takes a plucky kitchen to prepare such a plethora of pullets.

My favorite was the schnitzel, thick, juicy, and crisply fried, served with lemon wedges (the Austrian way) and two other condiments I’ve never before seen with schnitzel, one a tartare sauce (here called TarTar) and the other a chunky tomato sauce (here called Tomato-Goulash). That red sauce was good enough to make me long for a kitchen breakthrough, chicken parmigiana. The duo of chicken breast and chicken leg was satisfying home cooking, but the cassoulet missed — everything was overcooked and bland. I rather enjoyed a vegetarian special of “black truffle macaroni gratin,” wildly creamy and made with whole wheat pasta, but one of my guests set me straight when he described it as “the creation of a healthy housewife who got it wrong.”

Mountain Bird did not have a liquor license until recently, and now there’s a small list, the best deal on my visit Pol Roger Champagne for $75. There’s also many misspellings, some cute. I rather liked Albariño spelled Albariñio, adding the click of castanets to a simple Spanish white. The desserts, appealingly presented in a display case, are all cakes, even when you’d think they shouldn’t be. The toffee fig pudding, here re-purposed as sticky toffee walnut fig cake, was the best of the four I tried.

Still can’t find the avian option right for you? Don’t despair. A special the evening I stopped by was ostrich tartare.

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I’m probably being rude, paying too much attention to the off-color mutterings of the chatty woman at the end of the bar. I admit, I’m a little bored. My friend and I have been waiting more than a half-hour for our table at Minton’s Jazz Club, and the delay will stretch to 55 minutes in all. I could drink myself silly, of course, but the cocktails are too sweet for me, heavy on the syrups.

While it’s nice to listen to the faint melodies of the far-off band, located way at the opposite end of a long, narrow dining area, gentlemen of a certain age playing sweetly but not too enthusiastically, I need more stimulation than that to keep me alert. We’re sure not stompin’ at the Savoy. Our reservation was for 9:30, but nobody is interested in moving us to a table, even though a couple of the worst ones are unoccupied.

The combo has launched into Night and Day, just riffing. We ask the bartender, a nice guy, his opinion of the house band, and he’s appreciative, says, “They show up every day, on time, they entertain the crowd, they’re real pros.” They sure do love slow-paced standards. If Cole Porter were alive today, he’d fall asleep.

The woman I’m overhearing has a few years on her, and she wears them well. She’s outfitted just right — red sweater, black feather boa, and some kind of black leather combat boots. She’s soon up and around, saying hello to everyone in the lounge, treating the room like the parlor in her home. She starts talking about an old friend, and I overhear snippets. “She ran a whorehouse…she was a hustler and a gambler…she had a one-bedroom apartment, which doesn’t mean she didn’t entertain guests.” Come to think of it, I could happily sit here all night, eavesdropping.

After awhile we’re led to a table, the worst in the house, as far from the band as you can be without sitting in the bar area. We get menus, a wine list, swell hot biscuits with unsalted butter and a cane sugar compote. The food is pricy but not unreasonable, considering that entertainment comes free.

My friend orders a plate of six assorted appetizers, tiny tastes, nicely presented on a plate especially made for them, but only the baconey rice ball with aioli is well prepared. My she-crab soup is creamy, tastes like crab, and has a few jumbo crab lumps on top and little yam skillet-bread soldiers floating next to them, a fine dish. A combination plate of lobster chunks and whole shrimp with grits and gravy is just terrible, possibly a victim of the late hour — the fish is barely warm, the grits are mushy and overcooked, and the gravy tastes like a Cantonese brown sauce. The kitchen attempted a desperate salvage operation, heating the plate to molten, but the only outcome was me nearly burning my hand. The sweet potato dumplings are cold and gummy, too. Our very nice waitress tries to save the day by bringing more biscuits, good and hot, and that helps. Then comes the banana cream pie, a mistake. I don’t understand how my pie turned out to be a parfait.

I did find a nice wine on the list, a 2010 Domaine Dubuet-Monthelie Meursault, fairly priced at $111, and I start taking notes: slightly sweet, well-rounded, no hard edges, not daring, not cool enough — then I realize that’s also a perfect description of the band.

What my friend and I loved about Minton’s is that it’s not like anywhere else in New York. She was mesmerized by the graciousness of the staff, said, “I’ve never been anywhere like this.” The drawback is that the food we had wasn’t good enough, but I have to admit I’ve never in my lifetime had impressive food in an establishment where the music came first.

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The lavender sign reading CECIL, in oversized neon block letters, is so old-world and inviting it could lure in anyone seeking sanctuary and warm food. You know immediately that you’ll be well-regarded, well-greeted, and well-treated at an establishment like this, regardless of who you are, and let me assure you that characters abound: the gent in the 1970’s Joe Namath fur coat; the preternaturally thin and aged luminaries from some Asian country where none of us have ever been, either philosophers or kung fu masters, stroking their long beards; the small girl in pigtails holding her menu upright on the table, reading it by the light of a candle, she and her younger sister outlined by the glow, conducting a private séance.

The menu, if you can read it, because the room is dim and the typeface teensy, is curious, expensive, encompassing, ambitious, and, allow me to add, probably impossible to pull off. I’m always nervous when a restaurant tries too hard, as this one does, to please every taste in every possible way. There are small plates (from Afro/Asian/American oxtail dumplings to a house-cured salmon summer roll), a “rice & vegetable wok bar” (I calculated 72 possible combinations), house salads (collard greens to deviled duck eggs), Cecil specials (Portuguese feijoada to Afro/Asian/American gumbo), burgers (shrimp or wagyu beef), and hot dogs (four different mini versions).

Please note: I have yet to delve into entrees. There are nine of those. Plus side dishes, which include crisp okra fries, the most irresistable item on the menu. I guess I still connect Harlem to Southern cooking, because I expect them to be perfect. They’re all wrong — too thick, too salty, too crispy, the okra overcooked.

The wine list is small and not very engaging, but it will do, even if the markups are high. My Beaujolais, $55, was nice enough, even if it goes for about 12 bucks in stores. I almost loved the bread basket, which cost $8 and supposedly comes with three freshly made selections — not-too-sweet hush puppies, soft rolls, and roti, the beloved Indian bread. I couldn’t admire it as much as I wanted because the roti was missing, and when I asked our waiter to please get some, he said they’d run out.

The portions are generous. The steamed black rice with chile-tofu and diced vegetables was a plentiful pile of good food, although I would have liked it better had the tofu been even a little spicy and, to some extent, soft. My friend and I argued about the gumbo, which I found too dry, more like a well-provisioned rice bowl. She insisted it was the way her grandmother made it, “ricey,” while I prefer it soupy. Best by far were two giant prawns from the small plates collection, served whole, heads-on, the kind to make any restaurant proud.

The desserts were saccharine, to understate the situation, except for the vanilla ice cream, which reminded me of vanilla sherbet and accompanied a pecan sticky bun sticky enough for two buns. The hot chocolate, thick and cloying, came with a hot marshmallow concoction so astronomically sugary it made the chocolate taste bitter by comparison.

The main dining area is barely lit by overhead lights, one kind that looks like the bug lights at summer camp, the other like the spaceships in Mars Attacks!. The room is oddly laid out, too, with far too many tables for two tightly packed in the center instead of being artfully spread out. Much square footage is going to waste.

The enduring pleasure I took in all three of these restaurants is that they aren’t afraid to be in-your-face friendly. This endearing and genuine affability, an attempt to make strangers feel at home, is not something you will encounter often in New York. I’ve always found Harlem to be welcoming, whenever I’ve gone up there, regardless of what year it was or what street I was on. It’s nice to know that even as Harlem changes, it remains one of the most hospitable neighborhoods in New York.